Music is a very influential medium of expression. A lot of people are affected everyday in the world by the certain music that they listen to and the connections that they draw to it. A lot of different aspects of music and features are seen as responsible for the specific emotions that music yields on the human brain.
One first specific type of aspect that affects our emotions is chords. Chords are an interesting feature of music. We hear them in basically all music in two different forms which is major and minor chords. Minor chords resonate through the mind as a sort of somber sound. This is due to the fact that the minor chord has a more complex set of sound waves that come off a little less harmonious. Having that kind of odd chord makes it difficult and a little uncomfortable in your mind to process which in a way correlates to your emotions when you’re sad. Major chords have an opposite effect because each note in the chord resolves each other which causes them to flow together quite well. This more harmonious and uniform noise causes a feel of comfort in our minds which leads to a more happy emotion. I think this is super cool because despite there being that uncomfortable aspect in minor chords present in songs, we still like a lot of songs in minor chords but for different reasons than we like the major chord songs.
Some other things that are very interesting are things like intensity and pitch together. I see these ones a lot in things like horror movies. Music scores in movies is actually one of the main aspects of why we feel the immense fear that we do when we get jump-scared by a demon or a hiding murderer. In a horror movie, they will take the moments before a scary scene and basically build on the music. As it progresses it gets faster, more intense, and more high pitch in that to build the viewers heart rates and to get them on edge so that they can drop the jump-scare with a very loud and unnerving note or choppy chord of notes all at the same time. The unknown factor and the uncomfortable chord aids in the immediate and immense fear that kicks in along with the adrenaline rush we feel. It’s super cool to see how if you take away the music in a movie, the fear factor goes away quite a bit without the high heart rate build from the music.
I think music affecting mood is a super interesting field to look at. There’s a lot of different theories that have their hypothesis of what they think is the reason for mood changing effects. I have a different idea than the rest of the research, however. I personally think that mood from a song comes from the environmental factors coming from when and where the song was heard or is usually listened to. I think it’s a faulty hypothesis but definitely cool to think about.
Music and Mass Media 